Nightmare“The Dark Follows Me” by Quincy Lee
“My Parts, Collected” by Melissa A. Watkins
“Room 602 at the Hotel In-Between” by Georgina Kamsika
Reviewed by Malory
We’ve three stories posted across August here, and in each of them we have a body that doesn’t stay put or refuses to stay whole. Which is a nice note of similarity.
“The Dark Follows Me” by Quincy Lee is about a sign language interpreter who works with DeafBlind clients. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that she’s been frightened of the dark since she was small and I thought this was a nicely handled setup. For Lee to give their narrator a phobia and then a profession built around moving through the world without sight is smart work. The tactile signals the MC uses in her work are built into the narrative early so that they’re all in place when things eventually turn bad. I especially found the writing around Hana (the client she’s telling all of this to) does a lot of warm and effective work in not very many words, which I loved. Where the story does lose me a little is that, when the crisis finally arrives, our MC is guided through it rather than working it all out for herself. After so much groundwork being laid around her competence, I rather wanted her to figure the solution out by herself. That said, though, this is the most thoughtfully constructed tale across the issue.
“My Parts, Collected” by Melissa A. Watkins is a flash piece and it’s done very well. In it, we meet a headless woman who’s calling her own scattered body parts home. As you do. There’s a foot in a ditch by the highway, a hand in a park, and we learn that the rest of her is spread out through various junkyards and graveyards. There are some grotesquely powerful images drawn here and it’s nice that Watkins has the confidence to let them accumulate without patronising the reader by explaining them all. Thus, my only gripe is a sentence near the end that pretty much spells out what the whole story is about. This was utterly unnecessary! The craft on show here, though, is superb.
“Room 602 at the Hotel In-Between” by Georgina Kamsika takes a flight attendant who’s been living out of their suitcase, and traps them in a hotel in the gap between time zones. It turns out that this is a place that accepts guests who are neither here nor there and there’s just one rule: staying means staying undecided. All of the guests are a well depicted rogues’ gallery and I found myself especially liking the pilot who’s waiting to be forgiven. If I have a reservation about the story it’s that this sort of liminal hotel setting is hardly a new concept and it did mean I spent a fair bit of the story a few steps ahead. However, it’s hardly Kamsika’s fault that they didn’t get to the idea first, so maybe I’m being unkind! The prose is effective and the uneasy atmosphere held me all the way through, making it a very good read, even if it isn’t an especially original one.
I came away from the whole thing thinking about Lee’s construction and Watkins’ images rather more than I might’ve expected to!